In 1662, the Spanish crown granted Genoese banker Domenico Grillo an incredibly generous monopoly contract aiming at reactivating the slave trade to the Spanish colonies in the New World. Yet despite the fundamental role Grillo’s slaving business played in the transformation of the geopolitics of the Atlantic, his fleeting incursion into the field of human traffic has so far received limited historiographical attention. This paradox may result from the little information that, beyond the records of his commercial transactions, colonial archives appear to have retained about the complex personality of this Ligurian financier. Seeking to bypass this frustrating documentary gap, this work draws on alternative historical, genealogical and archaeological approaches in order to explore the social and cultural meaning of the various materialities once populating Domenico Grillo’s intimate lived spaces in Baroque Madrid.
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